Will Bunch

STAFF COLUMNIST

Will Bunch has worked at the Daily News for 20-plus years and is now senior writer. Since 2005, he’s written the uber-opinionated, fair-but-dangerously unbalanced opinion blog "Attytood," covering a range of topics (but mostly politics and the media these days); it’s been named best blog in the state by the Associated Press Managing Editors and best blog in the city by Philadelphia Magazine. He’s also authored three full-length books and three Amazon Kindle Single e-books, including 2015’s The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, he worked at New York Newsday, where he was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.

Outsourcing an important skilled job to inexperienced workers willing to do it for lower pay? Check. Billionaire CEOs determined to break a union over about as many dollars as are buried in the couch of their 50-yard-line luxury suite? Check. Trying to take away employees' pension plan and require them to gamble their future on Wall Street? Check. Putting an inferior, schlocky product on the market and not going broke by underestimating the suckerhood of the American people to continue buying their $117 tickets, watching their cable TV network and buying their sponsors' lite beer?

Checkmate.

Let's do an official review. First they (by "they" I mean Ronald Reagan) came for the air traffic controllers, way back in 1981, and you didn't speak out because either you didn't fly or you just figured you'd knock back an extra martini at the airport bar. Then they came for the assembly line worker, and you didn't speak out because you were too busy watching the falling prices at Wal-Mart. Then they came for the public employees in Wisconsin, and you didn't speak out because (insert "cheesehead" joke here.) Then they came for the teachers in Chicago and you didn't speak out because you were waiting in vain to be clued in by some politician who wasn't in the back pocket of the hedge funds.

Then they came for the NFL refs -- and you went bat-guano crazy. You talked consumer boycott. You called your congressman and begged him to do something. You pleaded with Big Government to do the right thing, to force the greedy pro football owners to take the regular refs back, to do the right thing by these noble working men who just want a fair shake.

It's a little late, guys.

Let's be honest, when the NFL owners decided to lock out the refs rather than bargain in good faith back in June, you probably weren't paying close attention, were you? That's OK -- in 2012, a gaggle of rich guys trying to crush a small labor union is the ultimate dog-bites-man story, even in the high profile world of pro football. At this point in the history of American capitalism, it reminds me of a story that a prize-winning investigative reporter back on Long Island used to tell me about the mobsters he'd covered, that they were the kind of guys who drove around with massive rolls of hundred-dollar bills and threw wooden slugs into the tollbooths on the Triborough Bridge.

Why? Because they could.

And so why won't the NFL negotiate with the referees' union over its pay demand that amounts to roughly $100,000 a team per year, or roughly the price for a gimp-kneed backup linebacker? Why is it trying to make the refs quit their other jobs and work full-time, without paying a full-time salary, and trying to convert the union's pension plan into a 401K?

It's not because the $9-billion-a-year NFL needs the piddling amount of extra cash. It's because they can.